The Vanishing at Winston Lake
Inside the search for Marcus Simpson and what it takes to search for a man who left no trace.
By, The Find Me Project
There's a moment, early in the search for Marcus Simpson, when the water goes still and nobody on the boat says anything. The sonar's running. The drone's up. And everyone on that raft is thinking the same thing, even if nobody says it out loud: what if today's the day we find him.
That's the weight this case carries. Not drama. Not a headline. A 55-year-old man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who spoke to his family on August 26th — and by every account since, simply stopped being anywhere.
Chapter One: Thirteen Days of Silence
Marcus Nathan Simpson last spoke with his family on August 26th. The next morning, in the early hours of August 27th, his silver 1998 Porsche Boxster, black convertible top, distinctive, the kind of car people remember, was seen in the area of Winston Lake in Winston-Salem. After that: nothing. No calls. No sightings. No car.
By the time The Find Me Project received a community referral asking for help, Marcus had already been missing for thirteen days. That number matters more than it might seem to. Under our Guardian Angel Task Force protocol, we don't typically step into a case until thirty days have passed, not because we don't care sooner, but because the first thirty days belong to law enforcement. It's when they're most active, when the trail is freshest, and when an outside search effort risks creating noise instead of answers. We approved an exception for Marcus. Something about this case, the timeline, the silence, the community's response, told us waiting wasn't the right call.
Chapter Two: Building the Picture
Before a single boot hits the ground or a sonar unit touches water, there's a different kind of search happening, quieter, but just as critical. We ran Marcus's information through our open-source intelligence process. A fully automated first pass designed to do one thing: gather preliminary, publicly available information. Addresses linked to him. Contact records. The digital footprint that exists behind every one of us, whether we think about it or not.
Then we layered it onto a map. That's when a pattern started to emerge, a cluster of locations, points that repeated, that grouped together in a way that told us something. Not proof. Not certainty. A direction. At the same time, we put the call out to the community and the community answered. Tips. Theories. Local knowledge that no database, no algorithm, no piece of software could ever surface on its own. Somebody who'd walked that trail a thousand times. Somebody who noticed something felt wrong. One name came up again and again: Winston Lake.
Chapter Three: What We're Not Saying
We need to be exactly as clear in print as we were on camera, standing at the edge of that water. We are not saying Marcus Simpson is in a body of water. We hope, we pray, the opposite is true. But when someone disappears without a trace, the people left behind are handed an impossible weight: uncertainty, with no shape and no end. And when you strip away everything else, there are only three roads a case like this can travel down. He left of his own free will, needing distance from something none of us are entitled to know. And if that's what happened, that's more than okay. That's a resolution worth hoping for. An accident occurred, on land or in water. Or something happened to him that he didn't choose.
We don't get to pick which one is true. What we can do is remove uncertainty, one location at a time, until the people who love Marcus aren't left carrying a question mark for the rest of their lives.
Chapter Four: On the Water
Winston Lake wasn't a guess. It was a location built from tire tracks on a gravel ramp, a gap in a security barrier just wide enough to raise a question, and the instincts of a team that has done this before.
We walked the perimeter first. Looked for breaks in the rock lining, the wooden bollards, anywhere a vehicle could have slipped through and continued straight into the water. Found a gap. Found a scrape. Found tracks that led down to the waterline and stopped. Then we got on the water. Sonar down. Pass after pass, back and forth, methodically, covering the water column at every angle a vehicle-sized object could hide.
"So the good news is that we have been able to provide some answers, and we can say with confidence — over 95% — that there is not a vehicle, a person, or anything else in this body of water."
Winston Lake is clear. That's not the end of the story. It's one door closed, so the next one can open with more clarity than the last.
Chapter Five: Belews Lake — The Community Leads the Way
What happened next is, honestly, the part of this case that reminds us why we do this work at all. We put the call out again, and the response was overwhelming, hundreds, thousands of tips, theories, and pieces of local knowledge nobody else had access to. It was from sifting through all of that, cross-referencing it, weighing it against everything else we knew, that we arrived at a new location: Belews Lake, at a specific boat ramp the community had pointed us toward independently, more than once.
We didn't go out light. A drone gave us continuous overhead coverage of the ramp and shoreline, a perspective you simply cannot get standing on the bank. Below the surface, the sonar and dive raft worked the water column in careful, overlapping passes. We had additional resources standing by, ready to deploy the moment the search called for them. Total depth in the searched area: roughly 18 feet. Shallow enough, close enough to shore, that the drone's bottom-down view would have caught the signature of a vehicle or any major object immediately, if it were there. A handful of sonar contacts came up during the pass. Each one was worked, re-scanned, examined from different angles — and each one was ruled out.
"This area — cleared. No indicators of concern. One location down. We keep moving."
We also talked to the people who know that water best, boaters, regulars, people coming and going all morning. Most hadn't run sonar themselves. None had seen or heard anything unusual. Small data points. The kind that matter more than they seem to, later.
Chapter Six: What Comes Next
Two locations sonar searched. Two cleared. Seven locations also reviewed. And Marcus Simpson is still missing out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We're not stopping, and we're not standing still. Our process doesn't pause just because a search comes back clear, it evolves. We'll continue gathering open-source intelligence, mapping every new lead the community brings us, and using every resource at our disposal, drone platforms, satellite overview, and the volunteers of our Guardian Angel Task Force to keep narrowing the picture until there isn't one left to narrow. If a location comes in, it goes on the map. If it warrants a search, we search it. That's the commitment to Marcus, and to his family, for as long as this takes.
Chapter Seven: What You Can Do
This case has moved as far as it has because people showed up for it with tips, with shares, with attention when it mattered. If you know anything, anything at all about Marcus Nathan Simpson's whereabouts, you can submit a tip completely anonymously using our Submit A Tip feature, reach us securely on Signal, or email us directly. If what you know relates to life or death, call 911 first, then loop in the Winston-Salem Police Department.
And if you want to stand with us beyond this one case, because there will be another Marcus, another family standing at the edge of not knowing, here's how:
Make a pledge. One-time or recurring, every dollar goes directly into search efforts like this one, sonar equipment, dive operations, the fuel and time it takes to keep showing up. Pledge $30 or more and we'll send you one of our new Find Me Project shirts.
Grab some merch. Every purchase from our online store, including the gear our own dive team wears in the field, funds the next search, the next family's answers.
Share this story. Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and TikTok. The algorithm doesn't know Marcus's name. You do now. That's how these cases find the person who knows something and didn't know it mattered, yet.
We'll keep going until there's nothing left to search. Thank you for being here.
— Mark DeLuca
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